The present invention relates to modeling the cardiovascular circulation using medical images, and more particularly, to non-invasive patient-specific assessment of coronary artery disease based on 4D medical image data and numerical simulations.
Cardiac disease is the leading cause of death for men and women in the United States and accounts no less than 30% of deaths worldwide. Although medical advances in recent years have provided important improvements in the diagnosis and treatment of complex cardiac diseases, the incidence of premature morbidity and mortality is still large. One reason for this is a lack of accurate in-vivo and in-vitro estimates of patient-specific parameters that accurately characterize the anatomy, physiology, and hemodynamics, all of which play an important role in the progression of cardiovascular diseases.
Medical imaging based techniques (e.g., computed tomography (CT), angiography, etc.) are typically used in clinical practice for characterizing the severity of stenosis in the coronary arteries. However, such techniques only provide an anatomical assessment, which is often inadequate for clinical decision making. In particular, anatomical assessment of the severity of coronary artery stenosis often leads to overestimation or underestimation, both of which are undesirable. Overestimation of stenosis severity can lead to unnecessary intervention and subsequent risk of restenosis, while underestimation will likely lead to non-treatment. An accurate functional assessment may require measurements of pressure and/or flow, which are determined invasively.